Hoppy Porter / Black Ipa Advice

[domix]

Hi,

I'm looking at making a hoppy Porter / Black IPA. Somewhat similar to the Yeastie Boys 'Pot Kettle Black' and the Feral 'Karma Citra'.

So far I'm unsure of most of it, but going with a similar specialty malt bill to most porters found here. Aiming for around 50 IBU's with Citra added late and possibly dry hopped (just wondering if it may over power and of the malt/coffee aroma)

Unsure of what to use for bittering.

Going with US 1056 yeast, but welcome suggestions.

I originally made this recipe with the Kit and Extract spreadsheet, but using BeerSmith all the values seem lower (ABV, IBUs, OG).

Ideally the beer should have lots of body, chewy, black, around 8% alc and some refreshing hoppiness. 23L Batch

Would be grateful for some input.

Thanks

Adam

Beer Smith recipe:

Recipe Specifications

--------------------------

Batch Size: 23.00 L

Boil Size: 10.00 L

Estimated OG: 1.065 SG

Estimated Color: 65.2 EBC

Estimated IBU: 18.9 IBU

Brewhouse Efficiency: - %

Boil Time: 60 Minutes



Ingredients:

------------

Amount Item Type % or IBU

4.00 kg Light Dry Extract (15.8 EBC) Dry Extract 80.00 %

0.50 kg Caramel/Crystal Malt - 60L (118.2 EBC) Grain 10.00 %

0.25 kg Carafa II (811.6 EBC) Grain 5.00 %

0.25 kg Chocolate Malt (689.5 EBC) Grain 5.00 %

20.00 gm Citra [11.00 %] (Dry Hop 3 days) Hops -

20.00 gm Simcoe [13.00 %] (60 min) Hops 10.6 IBU

40.00 gm Citra [11.00 %] (10 min) Hops 6.5 IBU

20.00 gm Citra [11.00 %] (5 min) Hops 1.8 IBU

1 Pkgs American Ale (Wyeast Labs #1056) Yeast-Ale





Kit and Extract Spreadsheet outcome with same ingredients:
OG: 1.081

FG: 1.019

IBU: 50.8

EBC: 67.2

%alc: 8.6

 

[mwd]

Hmmm not tried the two you name but usually Porters are not very hoppy most of the flavour comes from the roasted malts.

Never seen a black IPA either would love to try one. As for hops I would expect the earthy or spicy might be the way to go I would think any fruity or citrusy hops would not go well in a Porter. Check on the CB website loads of hops and good descriptions of them should guide you on a suitable choice.

 

[dabre4]

I think your a little confused about this style of beer. In my opinion, a "hoppy" porter wouldn't work well with Citra, it would be like pouring a cup of coffee and topping it up with passion fruit.

What your after is use a standard IPA recipee and add a little Carafa special. I really love this style of beer, hoppy and malty with just a hint of roastyness. I recomend using somthing like 90% Marris Otter, 5% crystal and 5% Carafa. Adding chocolate would be too much in my opinion.

Cheers

 

[beerbrewer76543]

If using malt extract I'd sub some out for plain sugar too. All extract tend to finish higher and may be too sweet on the finish

If you can do a minimash then even better. If you had a 10L pot you could do 2kg of Marris Otter, 300g Light Crystal, 300g Carafa mashed at 67*C for an hour. The rest of the fermentables would be something like 2kg LDME and 500g sugars (added at end of boil or into fermenter)

Using the spreadsheet make sure to use the hop boil concentration factor as you will get less hop utilisation from a mini boil :icon_cheers:

 

[ploto]

Since tasting the Feral Karma Citra I have wanted to make something along the same lines, though being limited to kits & extracts I'm not sure how close I can get. I intend to use up some cans I already have plus a few extra bits: 1 x coopers dark ale, 2 x coopers pale ale, carafa II, US-05 and a packet of citra pellets. For the bittering I was hoping to rely on the cans and add the bulk of the hops dry. Haven't worked out if I'm going to add any sugar yet.

There's a few black IPA-ish recipes floating around the forum & database, mostly AG but they have hints you can take from them. Have a look at the Black Diamond, Black Passion, 62 Black IPA and What Becomes Of The Broken Hearted. Good luck and be sure to let us know how it goes.

 

[yalnikim]

Gidday... here's the recipe for PKB Remix 2010... 6.8% and 60ibu. It's pretty much the same beer as the first homebrew Pot Kettle Black I brewed in late 2007, and then again in early 2008 (without any idea that I'd make it commercially). It was close to a year after I first made it, and well after we'd made the first commercial batch, that I heard of the term Black IPA and the rise of these beers in the US. I liked the term, as a bit of a laugh, but I certainly consider Pot Kettle Black (and this remix) to be a Porter. It's just a bit hoppier than usual.

The standard Pot Kettle Black uses exactly the same crystal, pale and black malts but a little more pale malt, no munich, and 6% melanoidin. It is hpped to a similar OG/IBU ratio with a little Sauvin, a bit of Styrian and a lot of NZ Cascade (7g/L all up). For the styrian addition we've tried pacifica and motueka but neither of these hops work that well with black malts in my opinion. I'm not sure Citra does either (and I wouldn't use too much Sauvin). I'm intending to move the PKB grain bill back a bit closer to this remix recipe below but we'll stick with 6%abv.

PKB Remix 2010 (US Mix)
Malt:
56.3% Pale Malt(2-row)
25.0% Munich II
12.5% Crystal 90
3.7% Pale Chocolate Malt
2.5% Black Patent Malt

Hops:
n.ng/L Nugget 13.0%aa 60 min. (enough to hit 60ibu)
1.6g/L Cascade (US) 5.75%aa 30 min.
1.5g/L Cascade (US) 5.75%aa 15 min.
3.0g/L Cascade (US) 5.75%aa 0 min.
0.5g/L Cascade (US) 5.75%aa Dry hop warm (after krausen)
0.5g/L Cascade (US) 5.75%aa Dry hop warm (after krausen + 4days)

Yeast:
US Ale


Personally, I wouldn't use carafa special or sinamar... it's just a bit of gimmick for people who are interested in making a hoppy dark beer but aren't interested in really thinking. I guess you could produce one IPA and then put food colouring in for the Red IPA and sinamar for your Black IPA... but who really wants that? Hope to try the Feral beer or the Thorny Goat when I'm in Melbourne next month.

Slainte mhath
Stu

 

[domix]

Wow. thanks for all that info. I've put this idea to the back burner for the moment and my next project is a stout.
Aiming to move on to using more grain in my beers so will be able do a beer like this justice. Not that extract isn't good, just hoping for more complexity.
Also the reason my next beer is a stout will be to get a handle on some darker malts.

Thanks again. I'm a big fan of cascade and look forward to making something like this in the next couple of months.

The Thorny Goat is quite a nice beer, but I enjoy pretty much everything Mountain Goat put out. ( I was almost lining up at the door on the day of release)

 

[yalnikim]

The Thorny Goat is quite a nice beer, but I enjoy pretty much everything Mountain Goat put out. ( I was almost lining up at the door on the day of release)

Surefoot was the head-and-shoulders above everything else, for me, during an intensive week of research in Melbourne last May. On tap at the brewery on a jubilant Friday night helped... but it was such a beautifully made beer. Great yeast character, so drinkable.

 

[jacknohe]

Gidday... here's the recipe for PKB Remix 2010... 6.8% and 60ibu. It's pretty much the same beer as the first homebrew Pot Kettle Black I brewed in late 2007, and then again in early 2008 (without any idea that I'd make it commercially). It was close to a year after I first made it, and well after we'd made the first commercial batch, that I heard of the term Black IPA and the rise of these beers in the US. I liked the term, as a bit of a laugh, but I certainly consider Pot Kettle Black (and this remix) to be a Porter. It's just a bit hoppier than usual.

The standard Pot Kettle Black uses exactly the same crystal, pale and black malts but a little more pale malt, no munich, and 6% melanoidin. It is hpped to a similar OG/IBU ratio with a little Sauvin, a bit of Styrian and a lot of NZ Cascade (7g/L all up). For the styrian addition we've tried pacifica and motueka but neither of these hops work that well with black malts in my opinion. I'm not sure Citra does either (and I wouldn't use too much Sauvin). I'm intending to move the PKB grain bill back a bit closer to this remix recipe below but we'll stick with 6%abv.

PKB Remix 2010 (US Mix)
Malt:
56.3% Pale Malt(2-row)
25.0% Munich II
12.5% Crystal 90
3.7% Pale Chocolate Malt
2.5% Black Patent Malt

Hops:
n.ng/L Nugget 13.0%aa 60 min. (enough to hit 60ibu)
1.6g/L Cascade (US) 5.75%aa 30 min.
1.5g/L Cascade (US) 5.75%aa 15 min.
3.0g/L Cascade (US) 5.75%aa 0 min.
0.5g/L Cascade (US) 5.75%aa Dry hop warm (after krausen)
0.5g/L Cascade (US) 5.75%aa Dry hop warm (after krausen + 4days)

Yeast:
US Ale


Personally, I wouldn't use carafa special or sinamar... it's just a bit of gimmick for people who are interested in making a hoppy dark beer but aren't interested in really thinking. I guess you could produce one IPA and then put food colouring in for the Red IPA and sinamar for your Black IPA... but who really wants that? Hope to try the Feral beer or the Thorny Goat when I'm in Melbourne next month.

Slainte mhath
Stu

Hi Stu

Thanks for sharing your experience on this. I'm looking at brewing a Black IPA in the new year and I'm doing a bit of research now to formulate a recipe. I'm keen on using NZ hops for this. You mention above that you've tried Pacifica and Motueka but they don't seem to work very well with the black malts.

Have you tried any other NZ hops apart from NZ grown Cascade with black malts that do work well?

Jack

 

[Thefatdoghead]

You want to add colour without the burnt malt flavour for a black IPA. Instead of black malt you might be best going for a de-bittered black malt or caraffa special with less acidity, tannin and harshness. fruit and burnt bitterness doesn't go together.

 

[yalnikim]

Have you tried any other NZ hops apart from NZ grown Cascade with black malts that do work well?

Jack

Sorry Jack, as per your guess I don't keep an eye on this site much .

NZ grown Cascade and NZ Styrian are probably my two favourites... but they all vary a bit year to year (and throughout the year). In retrospect I think it's the melanoidin that clashes with the NZ hop flavour... goes all strawberry on me.

There are a few new NZ hops about now too... I've heard good things about them but not yet had a chance to try them.

Cheers
Stu

 

[jacknohe]

Sorry Jack, as per your guess I don't keep an eye on this site much .

NZ grown Cascade and NZ Styrian are probably my two favourites... but they all vary a bit year to year (and throughout the year). In retrospect I think it's the melanoidin that clashes with the NZ hop flavour... goes all strawberry on me.

There are a few new NZ hops about now too... I've heard good things about them but not yet had a chance to try them.

Cheers
Stu

Ok thanks Stu. Time to experiment!

 

[RobboMC]

Since tasting the Feral Karma Citra I have wanted to make something along the same lines, though being limited to kits & extracts I'm not sure how close I can get. I intend to use up some cans I already have plus a few extra bits: 1 x coopers dark ale, 2 x coopers pale ale, carafa II, US-05 and a packet of citra pellets. For the bittering I was hoping to rely on the cans and add the bulk of the hops dry. Haven't worked out if I'm going to add any sugar yet.

There's a few black IPA-ish recipes floating around the forum & database, mostly AG but they have hints you can take from them. Have a look at the Black Diamond, Black Passion, 62 Black IPA and What Becomes Of The Broken Hearted. Good luck and be sure to let us know how it goes.

If you want to make something Black with kits and extracts you can't do much better than starting with a acn of Muntons Nut Brown Ale. The name belies the colour, it is Black as.

With 3 cans you have plenty of bittering, I'd even consider using only one of the Pale Ale cans and a can of unhopped extract instead, or it may border on undrinkable ( or is there no such thing )

Also ( and I know it sounds weird ) to get bittering without affecting the rest of the beer try using a kit of Pilsener. Clean, dry bittering and not much else. I make a Black Pilsener by mixing a can of Dark malt into a Pilsener kit and add some of the usual kit pimping inredients like Crystal grain and it comes out excellent, especially when brewed under 16 deg C.

 

[ploto]

I ended up making that one out of a can of coopers pale and & a can of the real ale, plus 300g carafa II, 200g crystal & a handful of dextrose, plus the full packet of citra. around 5.9% iirc. It was probably the best kit beer I have made. I managed to save a few bottles and have been quietly getting into one every month or so. After about 6 months it is still reasonably hoppy but the roast flavours have come out nicely in the background, without being obvious. I'm definitely keen to tackle an AG version of this one day.